1702 – Queen Anne ascends throne upon death of King William III
1722 – Afghan monarch Mir Mahmud occupies Persia
1817 – The New York Stock Exchange is founded.
1862 – Confederate ironclad “Merrimack” launched
1884 – Susan B. Anthony addresses the U.S. House Judiciary Committee arguing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. Anthony’s argument came 16 years after legislators had first introduced a federal women’s suffrage amendment.
1894 – The state of New York enacts the nation’s first dog-licensing law.
1913 – Internal Revenue Service begins to levy and collect income taxes
1916 – US invades Cuba for third time, this to end corrupt Menocal regime
1936 – The first stock car race is held in Daytona Beach, Florida
1959 – Groucho, Chico & Harpo’s final TV appearance together
1979 – First extraterrestrial volcano discovered on Jupiter’s satellite Io
1983 – IBM releases PC DOS version 2.0
1983 – President Reagan calls the USSR an “Evil Empire”
1995 – -26°F in Bismarck, North Dakota
1999 – The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the murder convictions of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing.
2013 – North Korea terminates all peace pacts with South Korea
2014 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people loses contact and disappears, prompting the most expensive search effort in history
Birthdays
1804 – Alvan Clark, Ashfield Massachusetts, Astronomer and maker of the Dearborn Observatory telescope, Old University of Chicago, the largest telescope in the world at the time
Deaths
883 – Albumasar, Arabic astronomer, dies
1853 – Edward John Dent, British Clockmaker, dies at 62 Edward John Dent was born in 1790 and apprenticed at the age of 14 to his grandfather, a tallow chandler. By the age of 17, he became fascinated with watchmaking and his grandfather agreed to transfer the remaining seven year apprenticeship to Edward Gaudin a watchmaker. By the time he was 24, Mr. Dent was well known as a master craftsman and watchmaker and soon was producing chronometers on his own. In a letter to the Board of Ordnance, dated March, 1829, John Pond – at the time Astronomer Royal – described Dent as “among the best workmen of the present day.” His reputation was given another boost when, in August, 1829, Dent Marine Chronometer No. 114 won the First Premium Award at the Seventh Annual Trial of Chronometers.
In 1852 Dent won the commission to make the great clock-now popularly called Big Ben-for the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, but he died before completing the project. Edward John Dent died on 8 March 1853, at the age of 62 and his adopted son completed the Great Clock.
1973 – Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, rocker (Grateful Dead) dies at 27
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com Wikipedia and other internet searches